Football-related head injuries affect players' loved ones

'It's a great game. But now, I watch football with different eyes'The loved ones of players who suffered traumatic brain injuries go though life knowing the damage might have been prevented

DAVID BARRON, Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle

Published 5:30 am, Monday, October 25, 2010

Photo: BOB ROSSITER, ALL

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Virginia Grimsley, at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, endorses the league's efforts to protect players and their families from what she has endured after her husband, John, died.

Virginia Grimsley, at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, endorses the league's efforts to protect players and their families from what she has endured after her husband, John, died.

Photo: BOB ROSSITER, ALL

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John Grimsley suffered from a degenerative brain disease at the time of his death.

John Grimsley suffered from a degenerative brain disease at the time of his death.

Photo: Steve Ueckert, Chronicle

Football-related head injuries affect players' loved ones

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Virginia Grimsleygrew to love football as she grew to love her high school sweetheart, John Grimsley, who would become her husband of nearly 25 years and a fiercely competitive linebacker with the Oilers from 1984 through 1990.

Jocelyn Harris has her husband, William, and few things bring her more pleasure than seeing him dressed in his Texas Longhorns regalia when his alma mater lines up against Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas A&M.

But each woman filters the game through a different prism.

Grimsley, who carries a cellular phone whose voicemail greeting is her late husband's voice, has seen the photos depicting the brown blotches of rogue proteins that scarred John Grimsley's brain and contributed to his death three weeks short of his 46th birthday.

"He would always hit with his head," she said. "That was his thing to do."

Harris made an NFL living for three years, blocking on the edge and catching passes in traffic. Today, as his condition progresses toward the inevitable conclusion of ALS, his wife contemplates a future that is equal parts certainty and uncertainty.

"He's 45 years old," she said. "It's frightening."

And then each looks at the TV to see Dallas Cowboys tight end Jason Witten, having suffered a concussion last month in a game against the Chicago Bears, pleading in vain with trainers and doctors on the sidelines to return to action.

"I saw that, and then I turned to my kids and said, 'That trainer probably just saved (Witten's) life, and he's arguing with him about it,' " Virginia Grimsley said. "Football is still a part of my life. It's a great game. But now, I watch football with different eyes."

Each is a survivor, and a witness, to the state of football circa 2010, when our desire for action and contact is tempered by the knowledge that as the hits keep coming, so do the consequences.

John Grimsley was among the first former NFL players to be diagnosed, after his death, with chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, a degenerative brain disease caused by head trauma. Montgomery died in 1998, at 31, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, a disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement, for which there is no known cure. Harris was diagnosed two years ago with ALS — Lou Gehrig's disease - and is being treated by Baylor College of Medicine's ALS Clinic.

Each represents an element of the research under way toward diagnosis, education and, to the degree anyone can limit head trauma in a sport that resembles a three-hour rolling car crash - "Like a bunch of rams charging at each other," Virginia Grimsley says - prevention.

It was the Boston University research center that diagnosed Grimsley as having suffered from CTE at the time of his death and, earlier this year, published research that two former NFL players diagnosed with ALS might have suffered from a previously undiagnosed disease associated with repetitive brain trauma.

It is an odd duty for Nowinski, calling widows such as Virginia Grimsley and asking for their husbands' remains. His list of IOUs, including his own, tops 400. In Houston, it includes former boxer Termite Watkins and former WWE and World Championship Wrestling performer Booker T. Huffman.

John Grimsley, in death, has told his story. He died Feb. 6, 2008, in his suburban Houston home from what investigators ruled was an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound, suffered as he was cleaning guns after hunting season.

Virginia Grimsley believes her husband began showing signs of dementia at about age 40, a decade after ending an NFL career that featured punishment delivered and received in kind.

"I remember one play when he got clocked by an offensive lineman," she said. "It was one of the few times when I saw him get up I said, 'Oh, crap,' because I could see he had hit his head on the turf. But he made the tackle on the next play. When I asked him how he had done it, he said, 'I saw three of them and went for the one in the middle.'

"That's how he played. Once he took the helmet off, he was John. On the field, he was No. 59, and he was going to rip your head off."

As much as Grimsley loved the game, he enjoyed his post-football job as a hunting guide, and the Grimsleys endured the ups and downs of growing older together.

"He would forget this and that, and he would laugh and say, 'You know, honey, I took too many blows to the head.' Then it wasn't so funny anymore," she said. "During the last couple of years, he would leave the house in the morning to do errands, return and then have to go back because he couldn't remember what he was doing.

"Little things were going on. He was always very easygoing, very laid-back and slow to anger, and his fuse was getting short, and it would get short over stupid stuff. He would fly off the handle, which was out of character for him."

Not until May 2007, when Virginia Grimsley saw a report on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel that featured the Sports Legacy Institute and Boston University's research into CTE, did she have an inkling her husband's condition might involve more than aging.

"I watched it with my two boys and my daughter-in-law as they talked about the symptoms, and both the kids said, 'Mom, Dad is doing that already,' " she said. "John happened to be home when the show was on again, and I had him sit down and watch it, and I could tell that it was bothering him.

"I said, 'They're talking about this happening with only three concussions. How many did you have?' He said eight or nine in the pros that he could remember, and my heart just went to my toes."

Fatal accident

Grimsley's fatal accident occurred after he returned from Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Ariz., where the Giants beat the Patriots to end New England's unbeaten season, as Virginia Grimsley was on a business trip to Florida.

"When the neighbors found him, he had newspapers covering the dining table and was in the process of cleaning the guns," she said. "He had a new handgun, one with a clip, a replacement for one he had for 20 years that had been stolen when he was hunting in October, so he wasn't familiar with it."

Investigators surmised that one bullet remained in the weapon's chamber and that the weapon discharged, killing Grimsley.

"The coroner came here and had to recreate the whole scene, which was a miserable experience, but I'm glad he did," she said. "Anyone could tell you that John would not take his own life. He was a happy guy. We had no financial problems, no marital problems, and the kids were doing well."

Nowinski called two days later, asking for custody of her husband's brain. Within months, he returned with photos showing the presence of a toxic protein called tau, which impairs normal brain function.

"It gave me … I don't want to say peace. It gave me an explanation for why what happened to John could have happened," she said. "Comfort isn't the word, not when you've lost the most important person in your life. Nothing can give any comfort from that. I wish I had the word. It doesn't give me peace. It's an explanation. It's confirmation."

Nowinski's conversations with Virginia Grimsley and other survivors represent one side of what he describes as his "two-front battle."

"We know we have this problem, this disease, and we know that guys have taken trauma but that we can't diagnose CTE in living people and that we can't treat it," he said. "We also know the prevention side: that we can prevent risk by reducing trauma."

High schools involved

As Nowinski solicits donations to the brain bank, he also speaks to high school athletes, coaches and parents on the danger of such things as second-impact syndrome, which occurs when someone who has suffered a concussion suffers further damage before the first injury has healed.

A second-impact injury suffered by Zackery Lystedt, a Washington state high school football player, prompted passage of a state law mandating that any youth athlete showing any signs of a concussion must be cleared by a medical professional before being allowed to play again. Elements of that law were adopted by the National Federation of State High School Associations, whose guidelines were recently adopted by the University Interscholastic League.

On the research side, Boston University's Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy will begin next month to test retired NFL players via MRIs, spinal taps, cognitive, neurological and psychological tests, and genetic assessments.

"The only way we can diagnose CTE right now is after death," said Dr. Robert Stern, co-director of the BU center. "We want to move forward with understanding risk factors and develop treatment and have some way to diagnose people while they're still alive."

Long-term research continues around the country, but the Texans are believed to be the first NFL team to collaborate with a hospital in establishing a concussions center at Methodist Hospital.

The center's co-director, neurologist Dr. Howard Derman, is the Texans' team neurologist, and co-director Dr. Summer Ott, a neuropsychologist, trained at the University of Pittsburgh, a pioneer in CTE research and the developer of a baseline test to track players' faculties before and after a head injury.

Such programs were unheard of when Glenn Montgomery was delivering blows for the Oilers and Cougars. His death in 1998 preceded by more than a decade the recent discovery that head trauma can produce a disease, known as chronic traumatic encephalomyopathy, that mimics ALS.

"I always believed that Glenn's disease came from all of his injuries," Dwannah Montgomery said.

In the wake of the Boston University study, the NFL and NFL Players Association have expanded eligibility requirements for the 88 Plan, which assists former players with medical expenses related to dementia, to include ALS.

Potential beneficiaries include former Willowridge and Rice lineman O.J. Brigance, the director of player development for the Baltimore Ravens, who was diagnosed with ALS in 2007. Brigance joined his former teammates Sunday in Baltimore to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Ravens' Super Bowl title. It also could help William and Jocelyn Harris, who has spent a lot of time chatting about the NFL's new emphasis on rules enforcement.

Recent developments

"We've been talking about it a lot lately," Jocelyn Harris said. "It's a chance you take when you play in the league. I don't think any of these guys goes out intentionally to hurt anybody. So how is it going to change the game? We have no idea."

Harris said her husband's disease continues to progress and that his prognosis remains unchanged as another NFL Sunday ticks away.

For Virginia Grimsley, the NFL's heightened emphasis on head and neck safety is essential for players to avoid the consequences that confronted her family.

"They should take care of the guys - all of them," she said. "I know that John loved the game. He would have played for free, but, just like Witten arguing on the sideline to go back in, at what cost? It cost him his life. It's not worth your life.

"He was a blue-collar worker who showed up and left it all on the field. But it wasn't until years later that we found that he literally left it all on the field."